Inventor Spills Wine Secret: Put It in a Blender

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BOSTON — Decanting wine is a common tactic among some oenophiles,
and involves pouring the drink through an aerator or into a
special container to let it "breathe." But inventor and amateur
chef Nathan Myhrvold has an even better and faster way: Put it in
the blender.

This agitates the wine and makes it react with air more quickly,
performing the same role as decanting but faster, Myhrvold
said in a speech here at the annual meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science on Saturday (Feb. 16).

But the real reason to do it? "The looks on people's faces,"
Myhrvold said. "If you do this with a wine expert in the room —
it's as if you committed some deeply unnatural act."

"But it's food," he continued. "Why is it okay with daiquiris and
not with Bordeaux?"

There are several possible explanations for why decanting, or
blending, improves the taste, said Myhrvold, who holds nearly 250
technology-related patents and recently wrote a tome about the
science of cooking, entitled "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and
Science of Cooking" (The Cooking Lab, 2011). The practice could
lead to the oxidization of certain flavor compounds, vent pent-up
gases like sulfur dioxide or release other volatile components
from the wine, he said.
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Myhrvold performed his magic for a Spanish duke, one of the top
winemakers in Spain, throwing the royal's favorite
red wine into the blender. The duke did a blind taste test
and preferred the blended one, but didn't believe Myhrvold
afterward. If he'd "been a duke from years of old he would have
run me through with his sword right there," said Myhrvold, who
was once the chief technology officer for Microsoft and now the
CEO of the patent company Intellectual Ventures.

Myhrvold shared several other secrets from his investigations
into the science of cooking. Among them:

Cucumbers are less solid than milk. The former are 95 percent
water, while milk is 88 percent water.

Charcoal grills work via radiant energy, which leads to
uneven cooking. To greatly improve a grill's efficiency, layer
the inside with aluminum foil, which reflects these
electromagnetic waves.

If you put ground peas into a laboratory-grade centrifuge and
spin it for about an hour, you will eventually get three layers
of pea sediment. The middle layer yields "pea butter," a most
delicious substance that contains no fat.